LONDON — The United Kingdom’s largest nursing union has officially severed its commercial partnership with Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva, citing the company’s deep ties to the occupying regime’s military and its ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), a global heavyweight representing more than 500,000 nursing staff across the UK, announced the termination of its ties with Teva on Friday. As part of the fallout, the British arm of the Israeli corporation, Teva UK, was stripped of its sponsorship for the upcoming RCNi Nursing Leadership Summit, which was scheduled for October 30.
Carmel O’Boyle, chair of the RCN Council, confirmed the cancellation of the sponsorship. In a formal statement, the RCN leadership declared that Teva’s operations and its support for the Israeli military were fundamentally incompatible with the core ethical standards of the nursing profession. The union pointed to Teva’s record of sanctions and the intense public scrutiny surrounding its activities as key factors in the decision to end the commercial relationship.
The decisive move follows a sustained and vocal campaign by pro-Palestinian healthcare workers and solidarity organisations. Activists have been relentlessly pressuring UK medical institutions to end any form of complicity with corporate entities that profit from, or provide material support to, Israeli apartheid and its blatant violations of international law in Occupied Palestine.
Healthcare workers and human rights advocates have increasingly drawn attention to the medical and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, demanding that global medical institutions take a firm moral stance. By cutting ties with Teva, the RCN has delivered a significant blow to the normalisation of the Zionist entity within professional sectors, echoing the broader global momentum of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
This boycott highlights a growing intolerance within the British medical community for corporate actors whose profits are entangled with the military-industrial complex of the apartheid regime, sending a clear message that there is no business as usual while a genocide unfolds in Palestine.
Reference: PressTv